I Am Not Courageous. I Am Easily Weighed Down.

 Photo Credit: Rolando Morales Perez

“You are so courageous.”

This is what people often tell me when they hear about the things I do, have done, in order to live my truth.

I have noticed a difference too. It seemed that I was more willing to do what many people wouldn’t for my freedom.  I also thought, “I must be courageous”, but I knew deep down it didn’t feel like courage, what I was doing.

It was something else.

I wake up to a heavy weight on my heart. I don’t want to be awake, alive, here. I feel so heavy, so depressed. I am teaching yoga in one hour.

“How the fuck am I supposed to teach yoga?”

I feel crushed.

It all piles up: The engine repair and unexpected tax bill. The failure to sell my Birth Your Body of Work program. The low-paying and low-attended yoga classes. All of the little requests and expectations. And then my shower. The hot water isn’t working and a cold shower in the cool morning air before yoga. I don’t want to teach. It’s all too much.

I break. I’m a sobbing mess of tears.

I give up. I can’t deal with life. I don’t have what it takes to be here and to do the things. So many things.

My boyfriend drives me to class on the motorcycle, I cry into his shoulder the way there and pull it together at the last minute to teach the class.

i am not courageous.

I am easily weighed down.

I must be a bird, very light-weight and delicate because it doesn’t take much for me to be so weighed down that I stop functioning.

Then, I spend every possible moment (not taken up by what the day is requiring of me) in despair that I am here and that it all seems so hopeless.

It sounds heavy, doesn’t it? Well, it is.

This is why I am not afraid of suicide and I totally resonate with people who chose to take that ticket out of the weight of this world. It’s hard for me to believe that people don’t think about suicide! For me, I have lived a long time with this heavy ‘what’s the point?’ feeling that makes an opt-out option quite appealing.

I confided with a few colleagues about this heavy energy that I sometimes feel and how it makes me not want to be here.

One said, “I am not surprised that you feel this way given how sensitive you are. It makes sense to me that you feel weighted down by the world.”

Her words washed over me like a cool mountain waterfall. I immediately felt what she was saying, that this heaviness was not a fault or defect of me, but a natural extension of my in-built essence.

Another brilliant wise woman said “in order to be able to know our light, we must know our shadow.”

This wasn’t a new concept to me, but it entered into my ears differently this time. I understood it now as, in order to be able to specifically know the type of light that I uniquely carry, I must know my particular brand of shadow.

It was then that I discovered, that heaviness is my shadow. And that it is a gift, that reveals my particular light.

After the call, I decided to lay down and spend some quality time with my heaviness and she was grateful. She had much to show me.

This is what I learned from her:

1) My Heaviness Reveals My Light: The Pursuit of A Life Worth Living

Weight. Grave-ity. How weighty is something? How much does it really matter? Getting weighed down by things easily puts me in touch with a deep feeling of giving up on participating in most things in life. I simply don’t have the capacity to care.

I reach a point where I can’t. It doesn’t matter to me. I am done. I won’t. I do not have the will to give that thing importance or energy anymore. In fact, I have energy for very little.

This gravity puts me directly in contact with what matters, what actually has importance and what doesn’t. It shows me the things that make life worth living. It makes practicing and teaching yoga an obvious choice, because yoga makes me feel good. Yoga makes me want to be here.

It makes dance an obvious choice, because it makes me feel joyful, light and free as a bird.

It makes spending hours with my sweetheart an obvious choice, because what matters more than being in love?

It makes body-centred transformation work and human design an obvious choice. What could be better than bringing joy and relief to my fellow beings?

For the first time EVER, I appreciated my heaviness as a beautiful reminder that guides me towards what I am actually here for and helps me to remember that I am not cut out for the weight of living a ‘normal’ life that many others have the capacity to sustain.

This is why I escaped from my life and business as they were 4 years ago. This is why I got rid of my belongings. This is why I let go of affiliate tracking, JV opportunities, infusionsoft, business coaching, attending conferences and workshops and simplified my work so much.

It wasn’t because I was courageous. It’s because it was all too heavy. It was crushing me and I needed to BREATHE.

So many of my past decisions make sense now. My heaviness and being weighed down orients me, over and over, to who I am and what actually matters (not just what appears to matter or should matter).

Living a life worth living is a gift I carry and share, through my example.  I do this not because I’m courageous, but because if I don’t do these things, I’d rather not exist. 

2) What I Stand For

When I feel the heaviness, the hardest thing is to get up. I just want to lie down. It gives new meaning to the phrase “What I stand for.”

I stand for opportunities to uplift. I stand for yoga. I stand for dance. I stand for transformation. I stand for food. I stand for tea (and then I sit down).

I stand for these things not in some heroic make-a-statement way but rather, when all I want to do is lie down, these are things that will actually get me out of bed and on my two feet.

3) I Have Something to Say.

My heaviness lets me know that I have something to say.

I didn’t realize this until recently. I was at a brunch with a couple friends enjoying a winding conversation when I started to become heavy-hearted. Soon it was like an iron weight on my chest. I paid my cheque and went home.

At home I made my tea, sat on the couch and proceeded to write 12 pages of channelled words. They poured out of me, completely intact. 

I then understood the phrase “I need to get this off my chest.” Since then, when I wake up with a heavy heart, I often get up and take out my pen.

4) The Value of An Artist.

As I laid in my couch cocoon with my beautiful heaviness, drifting between insight and sleep, my mind wandered to some of my favourite writers, Henry David Thoreau and Mary Oliver.

I don’t know much about Mary Oliver’s economic reality, but I doubt she lived the American Dream with an SUV and a big house (I could be wrong, I didn’t check).

My story is (it doesn’t matter if it’s true, the point was what my mind was showing me) that these were people who didn’t have what it took to live ‘successfully’ within society and so opted to live on the outskirts.

And yet, no one is saying “Thoreau, what a loser! He couldn’t succeed in the world.”   We don’t see Thoreau or Mary Oliver as incapable of thriving. We see them as brilliant gifts who stepped outside of the everyday to offer a new viewpoint.

Seeing this, I began to value myself more. It’s hard to value yourself when you are not measuring up to the societal measuring stick and struggling with money. If I can hardly sustain my own life, I must not be worth very much.

But then, I really GOT it, by paying attention to my tense shoulders. They were completely knotted up and screaming at me…so I started to inquire.

They were angry. They were angry about life and what it costs and all of the burden of it. But even more than that, they were angry at me for having devalued and dismissed all of the things that they do day-in and day-out to bring beauty into this world.

I realized in a flash that I am so magical. Everyday, I bring something beautiful into this world. Everyday I touch someone’s life in a sacred ceremony of yoga or in an intimate Human Design reading. Or the exquisitely beautiful websites I have created. Or the yoga teacher training I am organizing.

It’s all so fucking beautiful.

And I am focusing on the economic markers? The number of people in the class. The low pay. 

Really? That is what I am focused on? How rude!

I have been so pickled in the brine of achievement and success that I am hurting myself with them all the time.

And meanwhile, despite psychically diminishing myself for being inadequate, I quietly continue bringing beauty, every day. This is a miracle. I am a friggin’ unicorn.

I spoke back to my shoulder, realizing how I have been grossly mistreating myself and I made amends.

“I am so sorry for not acknowledging, supporting and celebrating you for all that you do day in and day out bringing beauty into this world.

I will never shame you for not living up to the standards of what capitalism requires again.

You are you and I am so proud of who you are. You are what matters to me.”

I remember being captivated by the book “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

Now I see that something essential within me, resonates with the title.

My being is unbearably light. I am a bird in a world that is constantly asking me to carry suitcases. I have been making myself wrong for this for decades and now that I see what I am, I can stop doing that.

It is a gift to be light-weight in a heavy world. I am a messenger, carrying words in my beak. Now that I know this, I’m going to take better care of my wings.

You can support me to keep flying onwards and sharing my messages in so many ways.  Here are a few: 

1) Watch and learn about your Human Design on my beautiful Human Design Free School site and make a donation or purchase a Human Design Reading.

2) Understand, love and affirm me if I say ‘no’ to something relatively simple that you ask me to do.

3) Join the Flow Catalyst.  This is a gathering of women in awakening.

4) If you’re in my hood, come to a yoga, salsa or BooTy® class. (And even better, come regularly).

5) Offer me kind and encouraging words.

6) Give me a hug.

I help Women in Awakening to get into Flow.